Lytro: Camera That Lets You Click First, Focus Later

Meet Lytro, a camera that is different in many ways; or at least in one more prominent way than the others. For once, it assures you that you’ll never stay out of focus in any picture, for it lets you set focus on your image, or ‘re-focus’ on the image, after it has been clicked. Typo? Hardly…

The next big thing?

The company, Lytro is better known for its refocus technology, the very thing we’re talking about. The refocus technology allows users to ‘play’ around with the images, once they’re clicked on the computer screen. This activity gives the user the power to set any section, or object in a given image as the focus point of the image. The camera, unlike the conventional ones captures light data from various possible angles, for which it comes packed with microlens array, a special sensor; which basically is putting together many lenses in a tiny space. The second stage of the Lytro camera’s works comes when the image is viewed on a computer screen. Herein, high-end software allows users to set his point of focus, thereby adding life to still images, quite literally. Those who tested the prototype of this camera, touted this as the revolutionary moment in photography.

The Lytro camera is the brainchild of Mr. Ren Ng, who’s also the Chief Executive at Lytro. He’s had this concept with him since 2006, as a part of his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University, and it has also won him the best doctoral dissertation in computer science from the Association of Computing Machinery.    

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You could try ‘playing’ around with the images yourself, too. Just click here.